CIA's language on Benghazi was barely edited, White House says

11/17/12 1:25 PM EST

The White House made only small, factual edits to the CIA's initial intelligence assessment on the September attack on Americans in Benghazi, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Saturday.

"We were provided with points by the intelligence community that represented their assessment," Rhodes said aboard Air Force One en route to Asia. "The only edit made by the White House was the factual edit about how to refer to the facility.”

The White House and State Department changed a reference in the report from "consulate" to "diplomatic facility," he said. "Other than that, we were guided by the points that were provided by the intelligence community. So I can’t speak to any other edits that may have been made.”

After Gen. David Petraeus's closed-door testimony Friday on Capitol Hill, members who had heard him speak said the then-CIA director had testified quickly came to the conclusion that the attack was terrorism, and not the result of escalated protests against an anti-Islam video. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said Petraeus had indicated that the initial report pointed to Al Qaeda involvement, but that the talking points eventually cleared for use by administration officials had scrubbed that reference.

But Rhodes said that language never made it into the assessment that the White House and State Department received, and that any edit happened before it reached them.

“I can’t speak to what the process is within the CIA," Rhodes said. From early on, though, the administration "indicated we believed extremists were involved" in the attack that killed four Americans. "The president himself called it an ‘act of terror,’ right? So you have an initial assessment, an initial judgment, but you’re able to get more specific as … the investigation proceeds. That’s going to be the natural progression of events.”

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been accused of offering misleading comments in a series of interviews she did on the Sunday after the attack by pointing to the video as the cause.

"The focus of this has often been on public statements that were made by Susan Rice and other administration officials in that first week after the attack, those were informed by unclassified talking points that were provided to the Congress and the other agencies in the rest of the administration by the intelligence community," Rhodes said. "So that’s what informed our public statements. Now if there were adjustments to them made by the intelligence community, that’s common and that’s something they would have done themselves."